The Winged Man
by AlreadyPainfullyGone
Summary: AU The angels left earth once Michael defeated Lucifer. Castiel didn't fight in the battle and was left to become a freak show feature as his grace diminished. Dean is a demon, captured to be part of the same show, and to fight the last angel. Slash.
1. Chapter 1

The last angel.

Something he'd never wanted to be, never thought he could be. But his brethren had left, leaving him to the tender mercies of mankind when his grace began to weaken. When the veil that hid part of his true shape finally dissolved, leaving him trapped in his vessel, sporting a pair of glossy black wings.

He was a curiosity, sat on a stool with a thin gold chain around his ankle, giving the illusion that he was contained, fettered. Of course he couldn't leave, but that was thanks to the Enochian scrawl on the walls of his cage. The humans that had captured him knew that much, how to stop him from flying away.

The other angels wouldn't be back either. Maybe Anael would have come for him, or perhaps Balthazar. Maybe before the war. But now he was an outcast, one who had refused to kill his own brothers in the name of an absent God.

His father had betrayed him. Angels had died, many humans had died also. Now Castiel was the last angel left on earth, the last anyone would see for a good long time. Perhaps forever.

And he was a freak show attraction.

His life was sedentary, dull. Sitting in his cage whilst paying humans filed into the tent and gawped at him. Mostly their silence was reverent, and Castiel could barely stand their wonder, their awe, because he knows he is undeserving.

Some threw things, shouted, screamed horrible things at him because his kind had abandoned them. People had lost mothers, children, fathers, wives, friends. Their homes and lives destroyed by the last battle, as Lucifer was defeated by Michael, sent back into the pit.

Far too late.

Castiel could take the blame for his race's abandonment of humanity. His only breaking point was when they reached past the bars, trying to touch him, to lay their hands on his wings. The violation, the feeling that wrenched at what passed for an angel's soul – his grace, was too much.

Sometimes he hated them.

He hated himself for that, for the fact that he could no longer feel his father's presence. Hadn't for a long time.

The day the demon arrives Castiel is sitting, wing's tucked away, because it's evening but the first night revellers have yet to arrive. Two of the staff shove the man shaped thing into the tent, a sack over its head. Castiel can feel the demon, the dark energy that sings along his nerves, making him wish for his angel sword, to smite and blot out the abomination. The feeling mends something inside of his briefly, in that instant he is an angel – fully and wholly.

They kick the demon into a cage already prepared with a devils trap symbol. A foot of space separates it from Castiel's own enclosure. The demon swipes off the hood as soon as they release his hands from the wire noose that bound them, retracting it through the bars. The demon is possessing a man, well muscled and strong. His eyes blaze black with fury, a long whip-like tail snaps at the air, black and gleaming like a snake. His clothes, the clothes of his vessel, are filthy, a hole cut in his ragged jeans to allow the tail through.

So the veil has withdrawn from Lucifer's children. The thought interests Castiel.

"The fuck are you looking at? You never seen a demon before?" The demon glares across at him with his bottomless eyes. Castiel remains where he is, legs folded Indian style in their dusty dress pants. He unfolds his wings, spreading them wide.

"I have seen a great many" he says, evenly. "you are not unique"

"Owch, Feathers." The demon snarls around a mouthful of needle-like teeth. He abruptly shifts into a smirk. "Trash talk needs work, angel."

"Don't test me, demon" Castiel wraps his wings around himself, disliking this new addition to his purgatory. The demon watches his wings move, he notices, eyes following them with curiosity.

"I've never met an angel" he says, conversationally. "thought you were just a story, something humans made up." He cocks his head to one side. "what's heaven like?"

Castiel is mildly surprised by the question, and the genuine tone in which it's asked.

"C'mon...I'm bored" The demon sounds almost petulant. Lethal and childish all at once.

"I can't describe it" he says eventually.

"Well, fine, if you don't want to tell me...just not like I'm gonna get to see it, is all."

"No, I..." Castiel falters for the first time in his entire existence. "I can't really remember it" he mutters. His eyes fall to the packed earth floor, shamed and sorrowful.

Minutes pass and the demon says nothing, presumably having tormented him enough. Then Castiel hears him take a breath, of course, demons can never have 'enough'.

"What's your name?" the question is gruff, awkward. But Castiel hears the apology in it and it unnerves him.

"Uriel" he says, because that's the name he gave the people who caught him. His name is god given, they have no right to it, and Uriel is already dead.

"Ok...what's your real name" The demon looks at him shrewdly. "I'm Castor" he blinks inkily through the gloom. "When I was human my name was Dean." He says it like it's the name of a half remembered lover, adoring and wistful.

"Castiel" and it feels so good to say his name again, to feel it tease a flicker of recognition from his grace.

"Hello Castiel" The demon smiles slightly. "I take it they caught you too?"

"Yes, three years ago." Dean whistles low and frowns.

"Shit, they got me last week, killed two of them but..." he indicates the cage "guess they got me now, huh?"

Castiel doesn't know how to respond to that, so he stays silent, still like a statue. Dean watches him.

"Anyway..." the demon drops to the floor, stretching out and letting his tail wrap around his wrist. "They won't keep me long."

Castiel doesn't know what to say to that either.

They stay like that for a few days, not speaking again. Though Castiel notices Dean watching him now and again. Following the arch of his wings through the crowds of onlookers.

Then, during the night, they take Dean from his cage.

Castiel wakes alone and realises he's become used to the presence of a demon. Of Dean.

That night he discovers why Dean is missing.

The same men who brought Dean almost a week ago, come to collect Castiel with Enochian marked bonds. They lead him through the maze of tents towards a fenced in area surrounded by rickety bleachers full of waiting people. The area within the fence is of packed earth, rimed with frost. A devils trap has been sprayed onto it in red, along with white Enochian symbols for binding and imprisonment. Castiel feels a shiver of genuine fear.

As he is pushed through a gate into the enclosure, Dean is introduced from the other side. The men behind Castiel tug his bonds loose, shoving him forwards and snarling. "Go for him you sonofabitch, I've got fifty bucks on you."

It's a prize fight. One of the last demons against the last angel.

Dean watches him, eyes black and tail lashing slowly, deadly at his side. He launches himself at the angel with barely a thought, needle claws scratching, teeth snatching for his shoulder. Castiel punches like a stone statue come to life, hard and immovable. He throws Dean off him, staggering back and preparing for the next assault.

Dean's drawn blood, can taste it in the air, and it pleases him. Castiel is flesh – and flesh can be broken.

The crowds muttering and catcalls form a steady thrum of expectant sound.

They fight, slowly becoming slick with sweat and blood. Castiel is at a disadvantage without his sword, as Dean has claws and fangs to rip at him. But Castiel is also strong and infuriatingly quick. They dodge around each other, the bandages that modestly cover Castiel's chest where his wings would interfere with clothing, grow damp with exertion. Blood drips from his lip and a bite mark in his shoulder. Dean is battered, bruised and dragging his left leg, but grinning with his bloodied mouth.

The demon tackles Castiel to the floor, catching one of his wings beneath him. He cries out in pain, a harsh animal sound that makes the crowd around the enclosure howl with frenzy. He feels tears in his eyes, pain blossoming along every nerve.

Dean's face is against his throat, he expects a bite, but it doesn't come. Instead the demon inhales curiously.

"You smell...like Lucifer..." he murmurs. His voice is heavy and soft. Pleasure and recognition in every syllable. Castiel throws him off wildly, just as the men approach from all sides, preparing to capture them both and take them back to their cages.

The fight it over.

Dean has won.

Once back in their cages the man who bet on Castiel kicks him, hard, stamping on his injured wing where it trails on the floor. Castiel doubles over, wings wrapping around himself as the men leave. His arms clasped hard to his injured chest.

Dean said he smelt like Lucifer. Of course it's just how all angels must smell to demons, but he feels it like an accusation. Corruption in him, like the morning star. He shivers, tears beading his lashes.

Hours, or maybe minutes after the men depart, something brushes his clenched hand. He flinches but it strokes his fist open, easing his fingers back one by one with coiled dexterity. Dean's tail. It wraps around his wrist. Castiel looks up to see the demon leaning against the near bars of his own cage, hands wrapped around the bars themselves.

"That bastard hurt your wing?" Castiel nods.

"Sorry, 'bout throwing you on it. I was just trying to..."

"Win, I know." Castiel looks down at the tail, coiled around his slim wrist like a restraint, but a gentle one. "You're a demon."

"Doesn't mean I have no self control" Dean's voice is rough, he seems genuinely offended. "I didn't want to hurt your wing..." he stops, biting his lip like he's thinking hard. He shrugs. "I like them...never seen anything like you before." His eyes are green when they meet Castiel's, something not unlike pleasure rises in the angel's chest.

It's been a long time since anyone 'liked' his wings. Gawped at, sneered at, shrank from or tried to ruin...but no human had admired them as Dean had.

"Thank you" he says quietly. Dean looks away, but his tail stays wrapped around Castiel's wrist. After a while he lifts his wing, the injured one, slowly though the bars of the cage and then towards Dean.

The demon touches the wing without reverence, but with a kind of sensual fixation. He soothes the feathers that have been bent out of place, rubbing the aching bones of it. Castiel's eyes flicker closed. A demon is touching his wing, and instead of violation he feels only comfort, pleasure. When Dean's mouth joins his hands, touching the feathers with his damp lips and delicate tongue...Castiel starts to shake, fingers worrying at the tail wrapped around his wrist. Dean presses his face into the feathers, they smell like Lucifer, like his father's presence in hell. But also nothing like it, he can feel Castiel through them, the real him, bright and good and strong.

They stay like that for a long time, touching what was usually hidden, but was now left open to the world. That night they slept on the near side of their cages, only a foot of space between them. Seeking comfort in the nightmare world of men.


	2. Chapter 2

The fights become a regular thing. Every week they take Dean and Castiel from their cages and manhandle them into the arena. Dean fights tooth and nail whilst Castiel wheels out of the way and strikes back with the precision of his rank, he is a soldier after all. Sometimes he catches Dean's eye in the middle of things, with the crowd howling for blood and shouting the odds over them, saliva and beer and nodules of hard corn raining down on them.

Sometimes Dean's eyes are green, looking at him speculatively, making sure he hasn't hurt him too badly.

After the fights, when one of them has pinned the other and they are both dragged back to their holding cells, Dean with a wire noose around his throat. They nurse their respective wounds, wiping spit and blood and sweat from themselves unabashedly. Castiel feels no shyness about his body, because of course it isn't really his, or wasn't anyway. He cleans it as he might wash his clothes, efficiently and without much thought. Dean often stays naked, even though their tent is cool most nights. For him his body is an animal thing, a tool and a weapon to be maintained and looked upon as a possibility – of violence, intoxication or sex. All can be experienced through borrowed flesh.

Once they were just men. Two men with the misfortune to be called into the service of more powerful beings. Beings who were now trapped within the confines of their bodies.

Once clean, Castiel wraps himself in his wings, feeling them brush his skin as he settles them comfortably. From Dean's perspective the wings conceal almost all of Castiel, his legs, long and pale in the starlight that filters through the tent, protrude, bent as they are, from the cocoon of feathers. Sometimes in the night a white hand escapes and rests against the black plumage.

Dean, despite his lack of modesty, wears his clothing when he sleeps; even so Castiel regularly wakes to the sounds of him shivering on the dirt floor. He cannot reach far enough to enfold Dean in his wing – it surprises him that he would even want to. Instead he stretches as far as he can, allowing Dean to rest his head against the furthest edge of his wing. The action leaves Castiel mostly uncovered, naked to the night air (he only owns the one pair of slacks and they are beyond repair now), but he has come to be used to the cold. Whereas Dean still craves the fires of Hell.

The demon's breath stirs his feathers and Castiel relishes the touch. After spending all of his existence with untold numbers of his brethren, he has grown incredibly lonely whilst trapped on earth. Dean too misses the press of other bodies around him, the hordes of other demons and their screaming, bleeding, souls. They both hunger for connection, for someone who understands their race.

Things change, and for the worse, during one of their fights, when a man throws a bottle into the ring. It strikes Castiel in the head before dropping to the ground and breaking on a stone. Blood runs from the wound in his temple, clotting his dark hair and trailing on his pale skin. He staggers through the broken glass, cutting his feet and falling to the hard dirt.

Dean flings himself at the confines of the devils trap, teeth bared and hideous half human curses escaping his furious jaws. The crowd panics, but only briefly, they know he can't get at them. Dean continues to rage until the handlers come to drag him and Castiel away – he bites two of them and breaks the neck of a third in a black eyed rage when he tries to take a hold of Castiel. A fourth man shoots Dean full of tranquilizers and begins to lift Castiel just as Dean looses consciousness.

He wakes up in his cage, Castiel crouching in the corner of his own enclosure. His wings shield him, but his cuts haven't been tended to and dried blood marks his face.

"You should not have harmed them." Castiel fixes him with sorrowful eyes "They are going to have you destroyed."

"And you?" Dean drags himself into a sitting position.

"I will remain here, I suppose." Castiel frowns "Dean...did you not hear me?"

"I heard." Dean levers himself to his feet and paces the cage, he eyes the devils trap on the floor, eyes flicking to the Enochian marks on Castiel's cage. "So we need to get out of here..."

"That is impossible." Castiel says, sadly.

"What if you could break the devils trap?" Dean looks down at the symbol again. "I can bust out of the cage, break the angel mojo on you and then..." he looks around the tent. "You got enough juice to fly us somewhere?"

"Theoretically." The angel's voice is cautious. "You would...you would free me?"

"Of course I would" Dean's eyes are wide and green, innocent. "I couldn't leave you here Cas" he realises that he used the name out loud. Castiel heard, and does not mind as much as he thinks he should.

"You wouldn't leave me? If we were to reach safety?" Castiel draws his knees to his chest, looking at the devils trap speculatively.

"Could never leave you" Dean murmurs. It's true. Dean can never return to hell, not now he's trapped in his host. He's stuck as an abomination on earth – same as Castiel. Safety in numbers. Besides, he has grown to like him, the strange angel with the pretty vessel. More than he would have in the old days.

It hadn't occurred to Castiel before that he could be better off having left this place, in the world outside he would be looked on as a freak, a monster. At least here there were bars to separate him from the humans – humans who would try to touch him, or hurt him.

Castiel raises a hand, palm extended towards Dean's cage.

Very little happens except that Castiel begins to tremble, breathing harshly as he concentrates.

The lines that make up the trap suddenly fracture, paint crumbling and rolling away from an unseen force, in flakes. Dean hammers at the bars with all his strength, bending them enough out of shape that he can squeeze free. He stands between the two cages, looking in at Castiel, still caged. The angel's face is upturned, filled with the expectation of disappointment.

Dean raises his claws to the nearest sigils, breaking the spell with one scrape of them against the metal.

Castiel flickers and reappears outside of the cage. His hand is gentle on Dean's arm as he takes hold of him, whisking them away with a rustling of feathers.


	3. Chapter 3

Dean manages to stay on his feet, barely, as they land. He takes in the sight of the darkened house around them before his attention transfers to Castiel. The angel crumples to the floor like he's been cut down. Blood drips slowly from his nose and he turns his face to spit delicately, rose coloured saliva striking the dusty boards under his bent head.

Dean drops to his knees, arm going around Castiel's back as he holds the weakened angel steady.

"Castiel?"

"I'm..." Castiel coughs more blood onto the ground. "I'll be fine" he closes his eyes, deathly pale and damp with sweat. "that was...more difficult than it used to be."

Dean raises Castiel from his place, hunkered down on the floor. He rests the angel's forehead against his shoulder, wrapping his arms just below his wings. There's very little furniture in the room, but Dean knocks the sagging cushions from a dusty couch, shuffling them into a bed on the floor. He tries to lie Castiel down without catching his wings beneath his body. He draws back, looking down on the huddled angel, blinking up at him owlishly.

"Any idea where we are?"

"Pontiac, Illinois." Castiel's expression blurs with regret. "This was my vessel's home. I could not think of anywhere else to go."

"Better than my guy" Dean rubs a hand over his grimy face, finding Castiel's sorrow more painful than he'd like. "He lived out of the trunk of his car." He looks around the abandoned, dark space. "looks like no one's lived here for a while...probably no food around." Both of them had to eat, another inconvenient consequence of losing their status as inhuman creatures.

He makes a quick decision, he has to leave Castiel here while he goes out. But he needs to leave him protected.

"Cas?" Castiel opens his eyes, blinking as if unaware that he had closed them. "I'm going to find some salt, you need to cover the doors, windows...vents, anywhere a demon could get in. I can't do it for you." Castiel nods, straightening up with a wince.

"You would be repelled by the wards also."

"But you'll let me back in" It's not meant to be a question, but somehow it is.

"Of course I will"

"Great...in that case, I'm going to score us some white castle and maybe some more clothes." Dean heads to the kitchen first, checking the cupboards. "There's road salt in the cloakroom closet." He calls back, eventually. He comes back into the front room, kneeling before the wounded angel and rubbing blood from his mouth with his thumb.

"I'll be back soon."

Once Dean has gone Castiel slowly makes his way to the kitchen, he finds the sack of salt and sets to work barricading the entrances. Once he's groped his way upstairs and paused outside the empty room that his vessel once shared with his wife, he feels worse than before. He hates that he feels guilty. Guilt is not something an angel should feel about carrying out his duty.

He wonders where the man's family have gone, and why they left so many things behind.

Castiel turns from the doorway and salts the remaining windows with practiced indifference.

Back on the makeshift bed he mutters an Enochian spell for protection. The effort has him on his back again, hissing out breaths in discomfort. He's expended so much of his weakened grace already. The thought occurs to him that if Dean attacks him he has no hope of defending himself.

He isn't sure why he doesn't fear the demon, even in his weakened state.

The room grows dark as night falls. Castiel feels the cold creeping in and wraps his wings around himself. His skin feels dirty from the fight, his feathers dusty and crusted with drying blood spray and spittle. His feet hurt from the broken glass and his head throbs with pain. He knows he should clean himself, tend to his wounds before Dean gets back. He doesn't want to be a burden, and so far all he's managed to do is get injured and then nearly kill himself during their escape. Demons were as calculating as angels when it came to weakness – the injured were of little use and should be discarded, the mission mattered more than them.

But what mission did he have now? Stay alive, stay out of sight? For though Dean could cover his abnormalities and walk amongst the humans if he kept his nature in check, Castiel could not. Dean had fellow demons to seek out, strength in numbers with his own kind. Castiel was an abomination to the other angels – weakened, humanised and strange, now with a demons taint on him. He'd lent Dean the comfort of his wings, there could be no hope for him.

Dean tapped at the door.

Castiel struggled from the floor and limped on his bloody feet, stooping to sweep the salt aside. Dean stepped cautiously over the threshold. In his arms he carried a plastic sack and a paper takeout bag. He took one look at Castiel's feet and cursed under his breath.

"Stay there" he crosses the room to dump the bags, then returns to help Castiel back to the cushions. Castiel lies down carefully, Dean leaves the room and returns with a faded wash cloth and a half bottle of antiseptic. "The hell were you walking around for?" he admonishes, dampening the cloth and going over Castiel's injured feet. The angel's toes twitch at the initial sting and it makes him look very human for a second.

"I had to put defences up around the house." Castiel responds after a while. Dean traces his fingers over the arch of Castiel's foot, the muscles in Castiel's leg tense and release at his touch. The angel breathes shakily and Dean finds himself wonder if he's ever been touched like this before. It doesn't seem likely.

"Yeah well...you should have said something" is what he says. Castiel's head drops against the cushions as Dean continues to clean his bloody feet. After a while his hands leave the angel's feet and encircle his ankles, weirdly delicate for such a powerful creature. Dean releases him, moving up Castiel's body to clean his head wound.

As he passes the cloth across his bloodied temple Castiel releases a breath, soft lips parting in appreciation. His eyes are closed and he seems on the edge of sleep, even dirtied and wounded as he is. Exhaustion is creeping in for Dean as well. Once he's finished with Castiel's wounds he pauses for a minute, then gently nudges the comatose angel awake.

"Castiel?"

His eyes open immediately.

"Yes Dean?"

"You want to get cleaned up before you go to sleep?" Castiel nods after a moment pulling himself into a sitting position. His hands go to the sweat soaked bandages that encircle his chest, a shirt being too much trouble for something with wings. After watching him fumble for a while Dean bats his hands away and unwinds the wrappings, catching sight of the fading bruises underneath.

Dean brings water into the living room, setting the bowl beside the bed while he goes in search of blankets. When he returns Castiel has discarded his pants and is mostly clean, passing the damp cloth awkwardly over his shoulders. When he's done the best he can Dean takes the cloth and wordlessly finishes Castiel's back, cleaning down past his wings, to the dip in his spine and down. Castiel shows no self consciousness as Dean gently smoothes the cloth over his flanks, buttocks, and down his legs. His work completed, Dean strips off and cleans himself over the bowl of grubby water, turning as a silent invitation for Castiel to return the favour and clean his back. Angry bruises have sprouted on both of them, along with many tiny cuts and scrapes.

Still slightly damp, Dean unfurls blankets and a quilt that he found at the back of the linen closet upstairs. He can't really describe his efforts as 'making a bed' but the resulting nest-like heap of blankets and cushions looks a damn sight more comfortable than their cages. He lies down, moving so that Castiel can lie, almost face down and half over him. His wings stretch out, one covering Dean's naked body without a thought, the other folding over Castiel's back so that the long feathers at its tip brush down his leg. Dean sleepily pets the softer, down-like feathers at the place Castiel's wings join his back. The angel sighs happily, pressing his face into Dean's neck.

The demon wraps his arms around the angel, hoping that their luck doesn't run out any time soon.


	4. Chapter 4

Morning brought the question of what the hell they were going to do.

Dean wanted nothing more than to get back to hell, but that was obviously out of the question. So he was left with two options, assimilate into human life or return to the other earth bound demons and ditch Castiel by default.

"We need money." He grunts, rolling onto his side under the cover of Castiel's dense wings. The angel's borrowed body presses back, unfamiliar but not unpleasant. Dean's used to sleeping with someone else, man, woman, demon doesn't make a difference if they're warm and willing. Hell, not even willing if he's pressed for company. Dean's never been short on warm bodies, even back when he was _Dean _first and foremost, not Castor – brother to Azazel's golden boy.

He wonders what Sam's doing now. Still ruling hell probably, not stupid enough to come to the surface with the waning power of Lucifer leaving them high and dry in their human hosts. Dean stretches his mess of muscles and bones, the body isn't so bad, especially not right now.

Castiel's arm trails across his abdomen, sleepily holding on to him. And isn't that just weird? Dean's never had a friend, or whatever Castiel is right now. He's had family, brethren, lovers, victims and frenzied fucks and torture sessions that blurred them all together. But Castiel isn't ticking any of those boxes right now – he doesn't want to hurt him, or fuck him (at least not more than he does any pretty body) but he likes this, lying close to someone's clean, hot skin, without blood and gore and spunk slicked over them.

Castiel is new and different.

"How are we going to acquire money?" Now that he's healed Castiel is far less docile and insular. His voice is curious but clipped, stronger than before. Dean's glad, he doesn't want to take care of someone, he needs a partner more than anything else.

"Steal it I suppose, not like either of us can work, not out there." Dean keeps his eyes closed, feeling Castiel's body moving slightly, his wings fidgeting. "We need to plan. You probably don't want to stay inside for the rest of your...how long do angel's live?"

"We are everlasting. Unless we are killed." The angel mutters gloomily. "Much like demons...though in this form..." he sighs. "I do not know."

"Definitely need to find somewhere for you then, nice bit of forest maybe?" Castiel curls happily against his side.

"That would be pleasant." He thinks for a moment. "anything that is not a cage would be...very pleasant." Dean strokes his back.

"No cages, never again" he promises, half serious. He doesn't understand humans, why they would take something born to fly, so obviously not of the earth, and chain it down.

They eat cold white castle burgers for breakfast and Dean finds a clean sheet to make wrappings for Castiel's chest. Sitting on their tangled sleeping area they consider what kind of life they can possibly fashion.

Dean knows he needs the human things like food and warmth, they both do. But he's also a demon and he needs to hunt, to hurt and claim and bloody human bodies. Castiel is an angel, he's a soldier by nature and he needs orders, a purpose, something to keep him going. Something good, worth fighting for.

The two sets of needs don't go well together.

"We're going to have to...come to agreement I guess." Dean says, watching Castiel ardently set to another burger, he's intensely focused and it's kind of strange to watch. "I need...well, you know demons. What we're like, what we want."

"I know what you are, Dean" Castiel says, sensing the demon's preoccupation. "Much as I don't relish the prospect of you killing innocent humans...there may be a way to reign in your compulsions...we will meet enough deserving people for you to harm."

"You'd let me do that? Thought you were supposed to love them."

"I did. I do" Castiel frowns. "But...being here, I remember falling for them and yet still they treat me with fear. They have caused me pain." He thinks for a moment. His formerly injured wing stirring at his side. "I do not think they are all capable of redemption, as I did before. My Father would think that...wrong of me."

An angel with no faith in mankind.

Dean can use that.

He's seen Castiel fight, and it's beautiful. The thought of watching him kill?

It stirs the demon in him like nothing else. Though there's an undercurrent...a dull ache at the thought of Castiel's pale skin spattered with blood, his wings clogged with it, eyes focused on the insides of a mortal, dealing death without faith or mercy.

The idea almost appals him...and Dean has seen enough, more than enough, to smother any sensibilities or pity he may have once possessed.

"It'll be ok, Castiel?" the angel looks at him with total concentration. He trusts him in a way that Dean finds unnerving – angels should not trust demons, even if they are allied as closely as they have become. "I won't bring it home...even demons don't shit where they eat." Castiel frowns at the speak device and Dean makes a mental note to go slowly with idioms and metaphors. He was human once, unlike Castiel, who still doesn't fully understand humans.

"If we rest here for a while...would you have enough strength to take us somewhere else?"

"I could, given a location and time to regain my strength." Castiel inclines his head.

"Great, so we pick out a forest somewhere and we never have to see people again." Dean realises how stupid that sounds, they'll probably end up freezing to death in Canada or somewhere even worse. "We're screwed aren't we? No God...Lucifer abandoned us." Dean feels the pain of losing his father again, Lucifer, the light of Hell and the God of all its levels – gone to the surface and murdered by Michael.

Lucifer abandoned his demons, his children, to try and conquer the humans.

Castiel draws Dean close again, allowing him to bury his face against his shoulder, wrapping his wings around them both. Dean can smell the cold, star-like distant scent of grace, the scent of Lucifer, the only angel he had ever know. Until Castiel.

Castiel feels Dean's demon energy pressing against his vessel, calling to his grace to smite him where he lies. He feels like himself again, though he would not harm Dean he knows that he could, should do so. He feels like an angel, rather than an abomination.

They both find it comforting, these reminders of home.

"We are not lost." Castiel murmurs, firmly. "We will find somewhere, and no matter how wrong our dominion of it shall be...we will claim it."

Dean knows what he means. God made the earth for man, heaven for the angels, and left Lucifer to tend his demons in Hell.

They are in territory not their own, this is war, and a war they cannot hope to win.


	5. Chapter 5

One week into their new, forest bound lives, Dean kills a man and a child.

Castiel managed to fly them out into the rural space between nowhere and nothing, so for the first few day's he'd been insensible, exhausted from the effort. Dean discovered a kind of manmade cave, blank chalk walls cut sharply into a hill with a shovel. Its freezing cold and the walls ooze rivulets of moisture at night but it's something. The only things they'd managed to bring with them were a bag of cooking stuff (pots and a few good knives) plus blankets. Castiel's wings provide shelter within their icebox of a squat. He's the only warm, soft thing for hundreds of miles and Dean holds to him like nothing else.

He kills for food. Dean's good almost as good at killing things as he is at making them suffer. Deer and larger birds seem to gravitate towards them anyway, something he attributes to Castiel's presence, a tiny scrap of purity no one seems able to resist.

Castiel watches him divvy up the steaming carcases with a kitchen knife, arms gloved in blood and innards spilling purple at his feet. He watches and takes in the smooth movements of Dean's body, the confident way he uses his blade.

Dean wears his thick canvas pants, military boots and jacket, which can never truly keep out the cold. Castiel fares worse, being without a shirt, he stays near their campfire and for most of the time, when they don't need food or more firewood, Dean stays with him.

Dean can feel the need to exercise his nature, heightened by their harsh environment, by his own anger at the humans, and even Castiel's presence isn't enough to balm his wounds. Humans caged him, beat and broke the one thing he considered his own, Castiel.

There's a twitch in his mind, an ache that says someone needs to die bloody, or he'll never rest again.

He lucks out, a couple of hundred miles away there's a small camping group, a man and his fifteen year old son. Dean seeks them out, sensing them while he's out patrolling far from the camp. He can read them as soon as he catches sight of them, and he is so very very lucky, because he's found a monster. For some reason it's important that he kills someone deserving, someone guilty.

He waits until night falls, he needs to get this right, can't have a bunch of people searching the woods and finding Castiel.

The man is older, heavy and greying at the temples, he touches his kid whenever he gets the chance and Dean can feel the black laced scarlet tang of lust in him. He's a bad father, a bad man period. His son, a victim to all intents and purposes, has fallen too, touching the younger girls of his neighbour, and his cousins when he gets the chance.

Dean breaks the boys neck, he isn't the one he wants.

The man he strings up, missing his rack, the sulphur and heat and heart of hell. He flays him open rubs himself with gore, stoppers the man's screams with a rag. Four hours he keeps him alive, going slowly, feeding on his agony until he's drawn so tight with blood lust he can barely think. He kills him outright, buries him and the boy in a trench fifty yards away.

It occurs to him that the man reminds him of his own Father, dead a lifetime ago and rotting in some far corner of hell. He pushes the thought aside, thinks of Castiel and the practicalities of what he's doing right now.

Covered in blood and sweat he breaks down their camp, keeping what he and Castiel can use, burying what they can't.

He makes his way through the frost bitten night, back to the cave, expecting Castiel to be asleep.

The angel is waiting for him.

Dean stares at him through the dark, naked as the souls in hell, covered in blood, his clothing wadded into a bundle. His eyes are the only white part of him, shining in the darkness. Castiel moves aside, letting him into the cave, wordlessly he brings water, warmed to body temperature, and a rag. Dean closes his eyes while the angel washes the blood from him. His eyes burn with what he denies are tears, he does not feel this, refuses to feel...forgiven, blessed.

Castiel wraps him in the warm weight of his wings, naked skin pressed to his own. They lie down and Dean feels his anger, his demonic impulses lulled into slumber by his actions. But the man in him, Dean that was, also feels calmed for the first time in centuries of life and death.

Castiel holds him closely and smells the blood on him, the death of a sinner shining on him like silver smoke. A clinging fragrance of smiting and vengeance. He misses his garrison, the days when such an odour clung to him also. When he gave benediction and justice. Now he cleanses Dean of fault and lays him down to sleep. His grace twists at the idea, what it left of it anyway. But he silences it.

There is more to him than God's will, now.


	6. Chapter 6

Castiel doesn't pray anymore.

When he first found himself alone in the world, trapped and hurting within the confines of his new, manmade existence, he'd prayed constantly.

_Father, please come back to use, please release me from this place and let me return home._

_Father, please forgive them, they know not what they do. Let me leave this place, please, Father. _

_Father, forgive me for my slights against you, and against my brothers. I still love you, father please don't leave me here. _

_Balthazar..._

_Anael..._

_Father, please..._

Over and over until he ran out of words. Ran out of English and Latin and Enochian. Until there was nothing left to say that hadn't been said a thousand times over.

_Forgive me...I love you...forgive me...don't leave me...I love you...Father... Brothers...please. _

He had prayed for revelation, for protection and salvation. He had prayed for the intervention of his brothers, of the God that had created him to love him, always, and had abandoned him. He prayed for all these things and a hundred more. A thousand.

And he received Dean.

The last prayer he offers up is to no one in particular, because he knows no one is listening. It's a vow, a plea, a promise...probably not in all honesty a prayer at all, uttered inside his head as Dean lies naked and freshly washed of blood between his wings. He can feel the warmth of his borrowed flesh pressing into his own vessel. A warmth that means closeness and comfort in a way that cages and silence mean only loneliness and pain. Implicitly.

_Like this...just like this, forever. _

Dean's body moves against his, just a little closer, and Castiel thinks maybe this time he'll get what he's asked for.

Dean doesn't think about Sam anymore.

When they were kids, really kids, in a life he'd lost long ago and had beaten out of him since, he'd thought about Sam all the time. Sam was his younger brother, his other half, practically his entire world.

Even after they'd died, even once Sam became the king of hell and Dean became a monster, they were still brothers.

He loved Sam so much it hurt. Killed and tortured and fucked his way through the hordes of fetid souls in Hell, and the only thing he kept of his old self, of Dean, was Sammy.

And then there was Castiel.

It wasn't a clean break, but somehow Castiel filled the part of him that's been missing Sam. Somehow Dean doesn't even really want his brother back, doesn't need hell or an escape from his host.

He loves Castiel, with as much greedy, possessive, _want_ as his soul can still dredge up.

And he doesn't want to share him, not even with Sam.

He wants to own him, completely.

It starts as a creeping desire, edging his usual compulsions towards hunting animals or scourging the humans who stumble into the perimeter. He looks at Castiel's naked vessel and considers it. Lust is further down the line on his list of concerns than he'd like to admit, and mostly its violence, control, torture, that makes his life what it is. Still, there's something to the curve of the vessel's back, the length and shape of its limbs, that makes him want, makes him consider the body as one he'd like to lose himself in, one he'd like to feel.

For the first time in his demonic memory, he thinks it wouldn't be about pain, about hurting something with sin and force.

He wants to be gentle, if he can remember how.

One day, one of the myriad unmarked days in their calendar of infinite time, Dean senses another Demon in the woods. A familiar quirk of energy, a stink of sulphur from a familiar corner of hell.

Alistair.

The one who made him, changed him on the rack from man into masterpiece. A monster fit to call the king of hell his brother.

Alistair finds him on his hunt, his host body made scrawny with starvation, his eyes white and tail lashing through a slit in the back of his stained clothes.

"Deano" his voice is scratchy. "Didn't know you'd been caught topside. How fortunate." His rat like face contorts as he inhales. "Angel." His eyes widen and with a kick in his guts Dean realises how he must have looked when he first smelt something akin to Lucifer on Castiel's feathers. Shame he didn't know he could feel is caustic to him. "You found yourself an angel, boy? THE angel no less." He curls his tongue into the roof of his mouth. "A fucking gift to the masses. If we're stuck on this arctic mud ball we might as well bring a little hell with us."

Dean looks into Alistair's eyes and feels none of his subordinate impulses, the lingering chains of attachment, master to slave, torturer to prey, rapist to victim. He feels nothing, only...only Castiel, and the feeling that takes over – _Protect, support, own, please._

Castiel is his.

"Alistair." He smiles, tail twitching. "and here I thought Sammy called the best home to him."

Alistair smiles benignly, rage rifling beneath the surface.

"I stayed here...take me to it boy" he produces a rough blade. "Earthbound life...gets all kinds of frustrating."

Dean leads Alistair placidly through the trees, towards the cave that shelters Castiel. He knows the angel will sense the demon coming, but what surprises him is that Castiel is there when they arrive, trusting Dean enough to stay put, even with a foreign demon being guided to their door.

He doesn't even need to tell Castiel what to do.

"Pretty." Alistair strokes a hand over the vessel's naked chest. "too pretty for you Dean." His knife picks out a line of red over the pale skin. "Just right for marking up...just right."

Castiel moves as fast as Dean.

The demon knocks Alistair to the ground, just as Castiel slams a hand onto his chest and burns the demon away from the body in a rush of white light.

It takes so much from him, but he does it, and it feels so good, so good to finally strike out.

Afterwards he collapses, sweat slicked and shaking. Dean drags the body away, hiding it to await burial, then returns to clean the cut on Castiel's chest and take him inside to rest.

"I knew you'd stop him." He breathes into the crease between neck and jaw, leaning over the supine body of the angel. "I knew you could...I'm sorry he touched you." He nuzzles, hands running possessively down the sides of the smaller body beneath him. "Nobody should touch you...just me, just me." His voice is low, but Castiel's eyes flutter open.

"You." And Dean freezes until a hand comes up to touch his face, his stolen face. "Just you."

And that's how it starts.


	7. Chapter 7

Castiel shakes beautifully in his arms, trembling like a tiny lost child.

"It's ok...I'll take care of you."

As he pushes into the tense body beneath his own, he tastes the skin of his throat, damp with sweat and mineral traces from their home. Castiel makes a sound that Dean would put down to agony if the angel's hands weren't holding him, pulling him closer.

He's already stroked every part of Castiel that he can reach, pressing his mouth to every curve of his limbs, to his feathers, the joints of his wings and the places they meet his vessels body. Chasing the tiny surprised sound that the other man made when Dean slid on top of him, following each whispered plea down the angel's throat. Castiel murmurs broken prayers, shreds of Latin and Hebrew and languages Dean has never heard on earth or even in Hell. At first Dean thought he was begging for reprieve, for Dean to stop his attentions, when enough English words came around again Dean realised Castiel was as lost as he looked. The parts of his speech that Dean understood were at once begging for more, for Dean to give him what he needs (whatever that might be) and simultaneously confused, semi-intelligible prayers for forgiveness.

When Dean pushed inside of him, Castiel went silent. His eyes closed and he wrapped his arms over Dean's shoulders, legs pressed up and open, wings twitching and beating limply at the ground. He whimpers softly with every movement, feeling Dean's tail wrapped around his thigh, tight, snake like coils squeezing the pale flesh. The tip flicks in the crease between his leg and his groin, rough skin rubbing him just shy of where he needs it most.

He understands very little of what is happening, though of course he knows about sex and about sodomy, and he can read the possessiveness, the promises in Dean's every action. He hadn't realised what it would feel like, could never have imagined it in his old position, a soldier, a warrior.

Now he's just Dean's.

The demon begins to move faster, moaning into the soft skin of his vessel's throat. Castiel closes his eyes and feels Dean's muscles twitch over his own, the slide of sweat between them and the clenching burn of his own body, closing around the part of Dean's vessel that intrudes on his own. One of his wings closes protectively over Dean's writhing back, the longest feathers reaching over Dean and down to brush Castiel's thigh.

Dean cries out at the soft weight of the wing, rubbing back against it, smooth on the down stroke, feathers ruffling upwards and prickling as he thrusts upwards. The other wing sweeps at his legs, feathers catching at his thighs, bunched with the effort of holding himself over the angel, they press between his legs and lightly touch there, the heavier joint and bones at the arch of the wing resting along his buttocks. Wrapped like that, cocooned in Castiel's wings and bearing down on the body beneath his, feeling Castiel shake with fear and ecstasy as he feels the pressure in his abdomen mount, his orgasm, his first, approaching, Dean feels a second of utter, vicious joy.

They have been abandoned and they do not miss their betrayers.

His body shudders over the angel's as his spills himself deep inside. The trembling creature gasps at the new sensation, his own release bursting hot over the skin of the demon's stomach. Castiel does not remove his wings, even when Dean moves out of him and lies on the ground instead. He holds him and feels the fragile bones of his wrists, the powerful arch of his wings. All his, always from now on.

"Castiel? If anyone tries to take you...I'll kill them." It's as close to 'I love you' as a demon can come, and he means it more than any human has ever meant the sentiment.

The angel kisses him fiercely, feathers ruffling upwards and standing on end.

"I would defy them...if they returned for me."


	8. Chapter 8

_Wow, I haven't updated for a while – many other irons in the fire, my fire is chock full of iron. Just a short segue into the next big action arc. _

One of Dean's hunting excursions takes him far from their home, tracking a man and his lover through the forest as they hike. The man he has no use for, but the woman? She has so much to offer, her sins are written on her like tattoos and scars. She used to beat her son, before he died in his crib while she was passed out drunk, she's stolen money from the old man she cleans for and she has lost another child through drink, while it was still inside of her.

Dean follows them and waits.

He somehow manages to misjudge them, they've realised that he's following them, and one night as he lies in wait, the man surprises him with a hunting knife.

Dean's bleeding out before he knows it, slashed in the thigh, femoral torn open, blood pooling on the fallen leaves. He remembers what Castiel has whispered to him, while he's held him close beneath his wings. That forgiveness, mercy, are things difficult even for angels, but things that must be strived for if they are to be better than the monsters who imprisoned them, who made them lower even than animals.

He's on the verge of blacking out, the man hovering over him, knife extended, waiting for him to die.

"I know what you are." The man drawls, his thick accent blurring the words. "Demon piece of shit, everyone knows...not so powerful right now, are ya?"

"Kill it." The woman looks both scared and exhilarated.

The guy looks down at him.

"He's dying already." He sneers.

"Easy to cut its throat then." The woman growls back. "You could..."

The rest is cut off by the knife ripping across her throat. It opens, blood pouring out on the ground as she gasps wetly and falls, shoved down into the bloody leaf mould and mud. Castiel stands over her, hunting blade in hand, eyes fixed on Dean and Dean alone. Blood spots his pale skin, his wings are spread, huge now that the feathers are pricked up with rage.

Castiel s killed for him for the first time, and Dean can't look away, it's a beautiful and terrible thing to see.

"The fuck..." the guy stumbles back, but Castiel moves forwards, blade coming up with a quick precision that makes it almost impossible to see. Hot blood spatters Dean's face and for a second blood loss and blood lust combine in messy euphoria, and this is the best it's ever been. Castiel and him, and bodies all around.

Hands press the wound in his leg, and the blood runs through Castiel's fingers, hot and quick.

"Dean..." Real fear grips him with a foreign intensity. He has never been so afraid of losing something before, the only thing he has ever loved this way was God, unassailable, immortal God. Dean is dying, going where he cannot. "Dean, please don't leave me..."

"Castiel." And the world goes a little darker at the edges.

"Dean" Castiel buries his face in the bloody fabric of his shirt. The blood of Dean's killer, spray from his own wounds, smearing onto the angel's face as his bloodied hands clasp at the host body of Castor, a demon that used to be a man named Dean.

But now he's gone.


	9. Chapter 9

Castiel stays with Dean for a long time, long enough for the sun to come up and disappear again. His skin is frozen by the chill air; he's soaked in cold, clotted blood, Dean's body lying mostly in his lap. He cries without conscious effort, feeling the tears run down his face and drip from his chin on to Dean's bloodied chest.

They killed him. Men had taken them both, caged them, and now that they had found something, anything close to completeness...they had killed him.

Castiel is an angel, he isn't used to using the language of desire, of hate or passion of any kind. He can't name the feelings that pour over him in all the hours he sits by the corpse that once housed his lover. He wants Dean with a kind of mad intensity, wants to see him move and speak and hunt. He wants to have the man and woman who killed him alive again, so that he can hurt them in the ways he is hurting, the ways he doesn't understand.

That's the crux of it, he doesn't understand, any of it.

After his long vigil he buries Dean's body, and those of his murderers, he can't risk them being discovered. Before confining him to the frigid earth he removes the necklace that was always around the neck of the other man, presumably the property of his host. He keeps it anyway.

In their hollow he exists without much food, without even sleep. He can't function like this, when it feels like most of him is somewhere else, dying. He eats the various plants that grow around the woods, he sleeps in Dean's place, smelling him on the blankets and furs, sickened by his own weakness, the sentimentality which is not part of his race.

Dean has introduced him to hunting, to humanity and violence, vicious pleasure and sex.

And now he's gone and Castiel is left with desires that trouble him, and a kind of...wound, in him. One which he cannot ease and which cannot heal.

It's weeks before he comes to realise something which really should have occurred to him sooner.

A knife wound couldn't kill a demon.

Dean's host was dead, but the demon himself would perhaps have been returned to Hell.

The hope that flares in him is more painful even than his grief, because he is powerless to descend into Hell and Dean, if he is alive in some form down in the pit, is powerless to return.

If he even wants to.

The traitorous thought cuts him and he tries to avoid it. But it's true, his brothers, his Father, they abandoned him even though they were supposed to love him. Dean is a demon, what can he know of love and loyalty?

And yet he promised to kill whoever stood between them, as Castiel himself had slain his Father's children.

He finds himself looking at the frost rimed ground, even though he knows Hell does not exist beneath the earth. He wakes to imagined screams in the night. He dreams of Dean and blood and hell fire, and he wonders what it would be like to die, to end the confusion that he feels.

Though of course he is unable to obtain even that relief.

_Dean dies in the arms of an angel, and wakes at his brother's feet._

_Around them hell stretches in either direction, eternal and dark. Above is the same as the pit below, writhing bodies in the earthen walls, over the ledges and dripping blood over the sulphur formations. _

"_Welcome home." Sam says, laying a hand on his hair. Sam's hand, like everything else, is covered in blood and sweat and the thick oils that let the racks run smooth. "I was beginning to think you were lost to us."_

"_Never." Dean sits up, noticing the stink of the place for the first time. Sulphur and blood and vomit, fear and pain and animal, feral smells of hate and malice. There's the faint odour of burning feathers, something he had once associated with Lucifer._

_Castiel. His heart twists as if a hand has closed around it. He needs Castiel. _

"_Brother?" Sam looks him in the eye, yellow iris's beaming to the core of him. "What happened on the surface?" He crowds close to Dean and inhales deeply. Even with his host body cast off and his demonic form resumed, the odour of Castiel's grace is embedded in him. "Oh Dean." He murmurs sadly, "What has happened to you?"_

"_Sam..." he folds in on himself, crouching to the filthy ground. _

"_You've been with an angel...you've..." Sam's eyes are like the fires around them, bright and unquenchable. "You're in love." And it's like the worst curse that has ever been uttered, in Heaven or Hell. _

_The other demons, crawling over their assignments, the twisting souls which have neither eyelids to block out the horror nor hope of rescue. Dean shudders, knowing that Sam in this moment is fully the King of Hell, and will consign him to a rack for eternity for his folly._

_But the yellow eyes dim, fading to brown as the demons resume their work._

"_You love it more than me." A statement, not a question. _

"_I could not reach you." Dean answers, hoping that it pleases his brother. _

"_And now you can't return to him." Sam counters placidly._

_If there was water in hell, Dean would cry for the angel that he had lost. _

"_I will try...I can wait." He says instead, looking up into the brown eyes of his brother._

"_You will have to." Sam shakes his head sadly. "And you cannot stay here, not within the final circle of Hell...you're contaminated, Dean."_

_Dean knows that Castiel's grace still clings to him. He has been wrapped in an angel's wings, he's been inside his vessel, known him in all ways open to him._

_He cannot truly be something of Hell now._

"_I'll find somewhere." Dean gathers himself, prepared to wander every circle of Hell for as long as it takes to find a way home. Wherever Castiel is, that is where he wants to be._

"_I will miss you." Sam looks at him, long and hard. They have been brothers since their lives were lighter, carried out on earth amongst other men. They have been together for centuries in the pit of Hell, and now they will separate, possibly for the rest of eternity. _

"_And I you." Dean leaves the centre of Hell, unable to imagine a farewell equal to the lifetimes he has shared with Sam. _

_He turns to walking through the demons who snarl and turn from him and his corrupted holds only to Castiel, thinking of him, so far away, as he travels through the bowels of Hell. _


	10. Chapter 10

_Wow, I haven't updated this for a while...sorry guys. Anyway – actiony things will happen soon, so stay tuned and stay patient. _

Castiel actually stops breathing the first time he feels it.

Angels.

There are angels nearby. He's scared that if he makes a sound, even the soft passing of air through his vessels lungs, then he will lose the feeling of connection, fine as a glass filament. So he doesn't breathe or move, or speak.

It disappears anyway.

It's been four months since Dean's death, months of loneliness in the cold woods, wishing he could starve or drown or suffocate – but he can't. Angels are hard to kill, even one in his weakened state, and he lacks the ingenuity or the resources to succeed. Even if he did, only oblivion would greet him anyway, angels do not have an afterlife.

The half human aspect of him, unfurled like the wet spawning of new wings on a pallid insect, still tortures him with desire and loneliness and love and loss. His body aches with physical discomfort and he finds sleep difficult, he dislikes the need for gratification that arises periodically, as if his borrowed flesh is not aware of the fact that Dean is gone.

And now there are angels.

He feels them again a few weeks later, longer this time, the crystalline hum of their presence like cold water on his fevered, fleshy brain. A taste of the detachment and peace that he once had.

Balthazar comes to him, dream walking as a blond man beside the ring where he first fought Dean, a place he often visits. He speaks the three words that before would have lit him with joy, purpose and the full hallelujah of the host in ecstasy.

"God has returned."

And he barely cares.

The agony of his grace being reignited burns him to the core. He screams, screams until he's raw and open like a nerve, the power flowing back through him like freezing acid, burning away the parts of him awakened by Dean and concealing his wings anew as his grace grows in strength.

Balthazar takes his pain wracked body away from the tiny cave, the section of the wood that was soaked in the blood of the love he'd lost, back to heaven. His vessel lies sleeping, and dimly Castiel knows that this is like a story humans tell – the sleeping form remaining unchanged while the spirit wanders, waiting.

But he doesn't know how the story ends.

He already thinks of humans from a great distance.

He returns to his true form, enormous and bright, without physicality, only thought, which creates and destroys and links them all.

In this form he would burn Dean's eyes, or the eyes of his host. He would burn the shadow of his lover away with his own brilliance.

Were Dean not already dead.

He cannot enter hell, not without the protection of the host, and so he will never see Dean again. Even God, whose love touches him like a soft tickling on his skin, the kind an imagined insect would create, does not know him as fully, as perfectly, as Dean once did.

Eternity alone is an even more painful concept now that he is surrounded by the whispering thoughts of a thousand angels, all of whom can see Dean's hands all over his grace, the soft coil of demon smoke that rises in the centre of him like a dying hearth. Crystalline bright as he is, transparent and pure, he cannot hide that one facet of darkness, tourmaline quartz to their diamond brightness.

He is taint itself.

Even his voice is not the same. The clear ringing angelic tones of the others resound around the heavens at their father's return, and yet his own voice, the only black key on the piano, a hollow note to make their joyous cry one thousandth threnody. His wings are somehow the wrong way round, like black snow falling onto white ground. He looks wrong, feels wrong.

He feels. And that is the worst crime of all.

_Dean wanders the unholy depths, dark and wet with blood like the veins of some foul creature. The cancerous bowel of humankind, where souls never stop screaming because they have no need of breath, where their hearts never run dry of blood to pour upon the sandpaper harsh rock, and where the stink, the sulphur and vomit, come and innards and sweat and tears, has nowhere to escape to. _

_He walks, never sleeping, tail curled around his wrist for comfort, black eyes and gore covered skin making him almost invisible as he passes, a shadow. The only thing that marks him out is the silvery shine Castiel left on him, the faint aura of love and grace that drives other demons from him like holy fire. When he speaks to remember what his voice is, to comfort himself in the endless dark that used to be his pleasure trove, his harem and torture chambers and banquet hall, his words are tainted with a sharp, lilting cry like a bird in first flight. It cuts his throat like silver, fills his ears with salt. _

_It is the yawning space of Castiel's breaking heart, screaming from the touches of grace on his spirit. _

_Sometimes he speaks, shreds his skin with the sound, just to feel him. _

_Hell echoes with the misery of an angel, and he laughs bitterly at the thought, driving Castiel's misery into the demons and the damned like a sickness. The cries of the tortured join that one brittle sound and swell it._

_Sam hears the resonating song of his brother and the angel, joined in chorus with the damned._

_He knows they cannot continue like this. _


	11. Chapter 11

_Sam lays his arguments on the table, counterbalances every point with proof, with sincere belief. He may be a demon, the boy king of hell himself, but he is also wise and he knows his people, knows humanity and knows angels. So he argues, because he knows that his very kingdom, his race, depends on removing the antidote from their poisoned domain – the angel's voice, it's grace, had to be exhumed. _

_Uriel's dark disbelief rained down on the king of hell, and Sam wondered if this emissary would even carry his request to the host. _

"_You wish to anchor one of the Father's messengers to the earthly plain." The voice rings through him and Sam feels the blood flow from his ears, sees his servants run screaming from the sound of it. He spits black venom into the light of the angel when he replies._

"_My brother carries angelic grace even here in hell, and your brother carries Dean with him, even though they are separated..."_

"_Castiel is once more with his kind, heaven has accepted him..."_

"_Yet he still carries Dean with him." Sam insists. "One cannot hold the other and yet have that other walk free of taint – they are both infected with their lover."_

"_Do not speak of their time there." The light thunders. "Their time was damned from the moment humans sought to cage my brother, to force him together with your reptile of a consort and on into sin."_

_Sam bristles at the slight of incest, he may be a lot of things, murderer, torturer, sinner, demon...but he has never sinned in that way, and never will._

"_Castiel was weak without our protection." Uriel booms and Sam detects a hint of compassion there for the stained angel in the garrison – the broken and scarred comrade infected with emotion._

_Sam almost pities Castiel that compassion – how it must burn for him to feel weak. _

"_It was not weakness that saved his life." Sam points out, doggedly. "He loves my brother, and to you that is abominable...to me it is impossible, because I have known my brother for so long, and love has never been in his nature...you've seen that nature reflected in your angel..."_

"_Cruel, desirous, vicious, blood thirsty..." Uriel spits._

"_But dishonest? Disingenuous?" Sam wheedles._

_Uriel is silent._

"_Everything he gave your brother he gave of himself. Dean has given, freely, for the first time in hundreds of years...and if he says he loves this angel, then he does...and they should not be apart."_

"_What you ask, is not only blasphemous, it is akin to Lucifer's folly." Uriel growls. "Do not summon me again..."_

"_I will fight you for this." Sam declares. "There is an angel in heaven who bares my brothers mark, and if I have to summon them all, if I have to launch holy war and rain hell down on your heads...I will find him." _

_Uriel's light flares and Sam's eyes burn, forcing him to look away. _

"_I wish your brother death for what he has done to mine." Reverberates around the room as the light vanishes. _

_Sam drops to the rock floor and clenches his heart around the misery he feels for Dean. Then he stands and lets out the cry to summon the demons, throat opening and black smoke pouring into the chamber through him as he calls his forces from the deepest pit._

_Boy King he has been made, and a war he has declared. _

_He intends to fight one._

_Dean feels the summons and struggles with it, knowing that Sam does not want his presence amongst the ranks. He can infer what it is in aid of, Sam must have attempted to negotiate with heaven. _

_Castiel must be back home. _

_God it tears him up inside to know it, to almost feel the glacial cool of the host against his burning demonic essence. Castiel is so far away, too far away from him. _

_He sits in the darkness of hell and listens to the battle cry, to the war as it builds around him. _

_Castiel's brother's will die, Sam might die._

_Dean lets the angel shriek out, feeling the rage of the host and of the demons coursing through him, as if he is their battle ground._

Castiel feels the war churning in the bowels of hell, the connection he shares with Dean beams it to him like a mushroom cloud, the oncoming storm

"Uriel..." he whispers, and his discordant voice agitates the host like a furious bee held in a glass.

"Brother, we will not surrender you." Uriel stands beside him, preparing his grace for battle.

"But I want to go...I could go to him." Castiel almost breathes, trying to hide the sound he makes when he thinks of Dean, the low note of hell in his tones.

"They are demons Castiel." Uriel intones angrily. "They would tear you to pieces just to watch your grace burn."

Castiel feels his heart ache in denial. Dean knows it would not be so – but Castiel...

Castiel doubts.

And Dean feels it.


	12. Chapter 12

_The war in hell is like nothing ever seen on earth. _

_Light battles dark here on a cellular level – the angels, enormous entities of light, coiled about with the long sinuous forms of the demons, pure darkness and hate clawing at the embodiment of righteous anger. _

_Dean hears them from his place on the outer circle. The screams of his brethren, screams of triumph, screams of pain – and the crackling shriek of angelic voices. He hears no news of the battle, no information as to how it's going, how their side is progressing. He has no idea if he's even going to be allowed to see Castiel again, and now he doubts that Castiel will ever want to see him, no now that the demons have slain so many angels. Not now that Castiel doubts his devotion, believes Uriel's grim prophesy that Dean would see him splayed on a rack, broken winged and bled out into the waiting mouths of the demons. _

_As he could ever want that – he'd died to ensure Castiel's safety. _

_So the war continues, Sam fighting for his kingdom's purity, for his brother's sanity and the demon's fighting for the simple fierce joy of hurting angel's, or fighting God's own children. _

_Dean waits for the final act of this long battle, for the raging shadows and flaring lights to stop, for the screams to die down._

_For the winner to be decided._

Castiel watches the battle below, so far, far away – through the eyes of his brothers. Heaven is empty of all angels, only the non-warrior classes are left, the cherubs and sundry others. He is alone of his kind to remain behind.

There are more black feathers to him now, hard and strange like long flakes of obsidian or jet, covering the softness of the down as Dean's last spike of demonic connection strives to hold on to him, to remind him of his word, of his bond. Castiel's voice is a raw sound, like a scream so ragged it could be agony or ecstasy, it's the sound of Hell.

He's losing his will to return, his devotion to the demon that saved his life and forced him to be something other than a soldier without remit, without purpose or his brethren. Dean forced him to live for himself, for the two of them...and yet he has always been an angel, and Dean was always a demon.

He doesn't know what's right now. What feels right is all too clear, but what he knows and what he is told combat that simple notion of clarity, of belonging. Dean is a demon. Castiel's love is reserved for the angel's and for God, and all his creation. To give it away in such a way, to one of Lucifer's creations, a human soul with his malignant touch...

Castiel sees Dean.

It's a flash, gone in a second, but he saw him, through the eyes of another angel on the outer circle of Hell.

Dean, a soot black streak of gore flecked skin, glowing with the remaining imprint of his own grace.

Castiel feels his brother closing in on the unwary demon, feels the angel's disgust and horror at the corrupted grace that it can sense, the feeling of Dean, not quite demon and covered in the influence of an angel.

He feels the righteous burn like bile, a mirror of his brother's feeling as the angel sword slips into the angel's hand.

Dean will be killed.

And with that feeling, that certainty that links one moment to the other, the last time he saw Dean, bleeding and dying and _leaving him_ in the most final of ways.

The anger and power he had felt in attacking his assailants. Humans. He had murdered his Father's children for Dean. That act alone proved that he had felt for him, had loved him as fiercely as he had ever loved anything.

If he could not trust his feelings now, he could trust those that he had already experienced.

He had followed Dean, had allowed him to kill when he had no love in him for mankind. He had allowed Dean into his vessel, to join bodily and clutch at the feathers of his corporeal wings.

He had lent him that shelter before he knew him. Now he loved him, would he let him die?

It would be insanity.

The cherubs fairly wailed as he pitched himself from heaven. They knew what it meant to have him go, to lose one of their number, one of the host in such a way.

Castiel blocked out the sound, and soared to Hell with the wildness of love and remembered loss to fuel him.


	13. Chapter 13

My novel 'Me and Mine' is now available on amazon, the link is on my profile page. As always I'm grateful for the interest, and I'm sorry for the wait for this story.

_Dean doesn't even hear the angel before it strikes._

_One moment he's raising his head like a dog, scenting and sensing the destruction in Hell, trying to tell if Sam is amongst the chattering, screeching wounded – then there's a sensation like ice and lightning, fire and salt as the angel sword swipes close to his skin, slashing a long, thin wound on his back like a whip stroke._

_Dean turns, mouth almost unhinging, shadow stretching and writhing at the touch of the blade as he rasps out a dangerous cry. The sight that greets him is enough to take the sulphur laden air from his lungs._

_The angel, a pillar of silver fire with wings of ivory plate, it's helm a peak of jet – raises it's silver dart of a sword again, rage boiling off of it like mercury. _

"_You will release the grace you stole." The angel booms, and the voice rings through Dean like a church bell or a rumble of thunder. "You will release my brother."_

_Dean shrinks back, his whole form unable to tolerate the light of the angel, pouring backwards like sentient shadows. He hisses, but he knows he is going to die a true death, that this is the end, finally. Then, the grace within him, the tattered fragment of Castiel that remains, rallies. It rises like a flag on a war ship, growing brighter and brighter until Dean is nothing but a thin shell of shadow filled with a light that does not burn, but warms – like Castiel's wings had warmed him in his cage so long ago. _

_An eye searing pillar of light blooms out of the shadow beside the ivory angel. White light tinged electric blue, topped by wings of pitch, armour hanging in trails of gold plate from the plumage. But Dean's eye is caught by the core of the second angel, the clawing swirl of darkness, running up against the light like furious ink. Dean's own essence. _

"_Castiel." The other angel breathes, awed and horrified in equal measure. "You were to remain in Heaven."_

"_Stand down Tamriel." Castiel's voice, his true voice, is nothing like the painful bell-like heave of angel speech – it has a low note, a beautiful sibilant hiss to Dean's ears – though the other angel shudders as if hearing nails on a chalk board. _

"_The demon has to die Castiel." Tamriel insists. "He has earned this fate."_

_And then the sword is coming towards him, and Dean cannot move fast enough to escape the light bearing down on him, the silver weapon heading straight for his heart._

Castiel's blade is with him before he even thinks of it. The familiar silver is gone, an obsidian black sword, with a keen blade and the jagged edge of a hunting knife appears instead – and Castiel knows it as his instantly. This is the weapon placed into his hand by the Dean in him. And now it will save the demon in question.

Castiel doesn't falter as he thrusts the black blade into the centre of Tamriel's seething brilliance.

The effect is electric. Tamriel screams like a thousand empty caves ploughed by the wind. The light of him dissolves, drips down and turns to blood before it hits the gory ground.

Dean is on him even before his brother has run into the cracked rocks of Hell. Demon smoke wraps around his grace, thick limbs and skin slick with blood rubbing against his light like an eager cat - and God help him it's the best thing he has ever felt, no physical pleasure was ever so complete.

"Cas." Dean breathes, and the grace in the demon leaves him with the word and makes its home once more in Castiel.

"Dean...I found you." The smoke curls with the words and flows into Dean.

The angels scattered throughout Hell let out their threnody as one, a boiling, screeching moan of anguish at the death of one brother at the hands of another. The abomination that laid a pure angel low. Castiel shivers in its wake. Angel on angel violence in the middle of a war on Hell – Heaven itself must be trembling.

"Dean!" Sam appears at his side just as Uriel, an enormous copper flame with a gold helm and deep blue wings, snaps into existence beside Castiel.

"Release the demon, brother." Uriel orders.

In that moment Dean could swear he hears the very core of Hell hold its ghastly breath.

"No."

Urial's brightness intensifies until neither Dean nor Sam can look at him.

"You killed Tamriel."

"He attacked my grace." Castiel's voice may have lost its edge of demonic hiss, but it is no less beautiful to Dean, even as Sam winces at his side. "He attacked my mate."

Uriel roars, a round of shattering rock and screaming men trapped as the water rises over them.

"He was your brother." Uriel shouts.

"He was my enemy." Castiel's voice rises above Uriel's rumbling, he flattens his jet wings to the ground and his light blazes threateningly. Dean senses the need in the angel, crouches under the shelter of that warm, living wing, nuzzling close to the light that would burn any other demon to nothing. Castiel's grace rumbles like a separate animal.

"You...are a repugnant sight." Uriel denounces Castiel darkly.

"And you are far from home." Castiel says, unwaveringly.

"May Father damn you." Uriel spits, vanishing on the tail of his words. The other angels disappear from Hell just as suddenly, both the demons and Castiel feel them go.

"I'm sure he will." Castiel muses, even as his wing nudges Dean's body closer to him. "But he shall have to return first."

Castiel looks at Sam, the King of Hell, with his featureless face if light. He bows low to the ground and Sam, decked in his red lacquer armour acknowledges the gesture of fealty with a graceful bow in return.

"I would ask your permission to take Dean back to the surface...I cannot sustain myself here."

Sam looks at his brother's shadow, curled small and humming at Castiel's side, almost invisible against the black wings.

"I will have you protected." Sam promises. "Go with him." To Castiel he says, "I trust you with his life."

"Thank you." Castiel lifts Dean, bundling him in the flowing light of his body. "You know where I am going?"

Sam nods.

Castiel sweeps his dark wings upwards and departs from Hell, heading home, to the cave that had sheltered them from earth, heaven and hell.

Dean wakes wrapped in feathers, and that is how he knows that everything is well with him. Castiel's scent is the same vague, feathery odour it always was, mixed with a burnt sugar smell and a trace of blood. Just like home.

"You still have your wings." He murmurs, kissing the feathers, feeling the silk slips pass between his lips, tangling the horn like spines with his tongue.

"I am the last angel on earth...my grace is weak again." Castiel mutters.

"Your brothers..."

"Have ceded earth to me...in my father's absence they care little for humanity...I think they see it now as my prison." His fingers stroke Dean's back, following the line down to his tail. "This I believe is Sam's doing – he wants you to remember where you came from."

"I'll always remember him." Dean says softly. "but aren't you...do you feel bad, that the angels are gone?"

"Humanity has my father...they do not deserve my brothers too." Castiel tells him.

Dean looks down at his fingers, dirty and ringed with black at the nails, but familiar. His old meat suit. He can feel the threads of grace in it, Castiel had used the last of his power to bring his body back, make him whole again.

"I will try, to deserve you." Dean says, ruffling his fingers into the soft dark down at the crux of the angel's wings.

"You've won me already." Castiel assures him. "Now...I'm yours."

On an earth almost devoid of angel's and demons, Castiel has come to believe that perhaps the hole left by his father can be filled. The humans have filled it with violence and greed, he intends to fill it with a different kind of faith. A faith in Dean, and in the love he feels for the demon. His feelings for his father had made him a slave, a soldiersubjugated by humans – Dean's love had set him free.


End file.
